Embracing Chaos

In this essay, I’m going to explore the question “If the human brain is Turing complete, what does that imply about the existence of free will?” And moreover, what does that mean about the ability to upload our consciousness into computers? First, a little computer science background. Turing completeness is the idea that a computing system has the same capabilities as a universal Turing machine. This theoretical machine moves along a long tape which has various symbols on it that the machine can read and write. The machine itself is always in one internal state, but will change to different…

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I am both proud and awed by the productivity of the rhapsody.com development team. Just two months after Rhapsody.com added playlists, a huge new feature has been added: a personal music library for bookmarking your favorite content. Along with it is a fabulous new AJAX library manager which gives users quick visual access to a large collection of music in their web browser. What makes this even more impressive is that one of those two intervening months included the end of year holidays. When I’m doing long-term project scheduling, I generally write off 3 weeks out of December because of…

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I’m sure by now most of you have heard that last summer congress legislated a new start to Daylight Savings Time this year. Instead of the first Sunday in April it’s going to start on the second Sunday in March from now on — March 11 instead of April 1 this year. Overall I think this is a good change — I’d prefer daylight savings time year ’round, except for that part where kids get run over going to school in the dark. But it is of course playing havoc with computer systems everywhere which have the DST rules built…

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[Here is the full text of what I practiced for my talk at Ignite Seattle last night. I didn't manage to cram it all into the 5 minute presentation, largely because the audience was reacting a bit too loudly in places. IMHO that's a good thing. You can download my slides (slightly updated from the presentation). Video coming soon -- check back.] I’m here to talk about a system of morality that’s based on the upcoming end of society as we know it. I’ll explain why only geeks and hippies can save the world. I’m serious — I’m talking about…

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So I’m preparing my slides for my Ignite Seattle talk tomorrow night (tonight? Tuesday night) and I go over to my friends’ place to practice with them and I am reminded that the format is not 15 slides for 20 seconds each but rather 20 slides for 15 seconds each! So now I’m trying to split each of my slides into four thirds and rejigger all the timings. Fun! I’d like to take a few moments out of my busy schedule to apologize in advance to anybody expecting a polished coherent lecture from me. I decided to take an extra…

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Next week I’ll be giving a talk at Ignite Seattle about Transhumanist Morality. It’s going to be a fun challenge to summarize my thoughts on the next thousand years of human history and how it forms a basis for a system of morality in 5 minutes or less! But I’m up for the challenge. The real question is if anybody else will get anything out of it. ;) The last Ignite Seattle event was tons of fun and highly educational. A really good crowd of people — a great way to meet like-minded geeks in town that you didn’t know…

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